"Pervious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all wade in water, and often, seeing minute mollusca on the bottom of the stream, plunge both head and neck beneath the surface, so that often, for several seconds, a large part of the body is submerged. Now these birds still have the plumage pervious to water, and so are liable to be drenched and sodden; but they have also the faculty of giving these drenched feathers such a good shaking that flight is practicable a moment after leaving the water. Certainly the water-thrushes ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... of th' universall stole Of sacred Psyche; which at first was fine, Pure, thin, and pervious till hid powers did pull Together in severall points and did encline The nearer parts in one clod to combine. Those centrall spirits that the parts did draw The measure of each globe did then define, Made things impenetrable ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... soles, which are made of untanned camel's skin. Observed to the Shereef, to tease him, "Why, you Mussulmans don't know what is good. Your legs and feet are bare. You have nothing wrapt tight round your chest. Your woollens are pervious to the cold air. You're half naked; but for myself, I'm clothed from head to foot, only a small portion of my face is exposed. You must go to the Christians to learn how to travel The Desert." "The Christians are devils," he returned, "and can bear cold and heat like ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... water encounters an impervious stratum as it flows downward through the soil, or one that is less pervious than the surface soil. When such is the case, the water will follow along this stratum, and should there be an outcrop of the dense stratum, a spring will be found at that place. This may be on a highway. The impervious ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... bamboos just now don that jadelike grace, Which worthy makes them the pheasant to face; Each culm so tender as if to droop fain, Each one so verdant, in aspect so cool, The curb protects, from the steps wards the pool. The pervious screens the tripod smell restrain. The shadow will be strewn, mind do not shake And (Hsieh) from her now long ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... deep branch, the death of the limb extends as high as the middle or upper third of the thigh. When the femoral below the origin of its deep branch or the popliteal artery is obstructed, the veins remaining pervious, the anastomosis through the profunda is sufficient to maintain the vascular supply, and gangrene does not necessarily follow. The rupture of a popliteal aneurysm, however, by compressing the vein and the articular branches, usually determines gangrene. When an embolus becomes impacted at the ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... the vessels are pervious and full of fluid, but by degrees thickening layers are deposited, which ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... fields, as was the Southern fashion at that period of the war, were uncultivated and overgrown with brambles. A large white house stood at some little distance from the road; we saw women and children and a few negroes there. On our left ran the thin forest, pervious to cavalry. Directly ahead an ascent in the road formed a crest beyond which ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... pure clay, lying below the depth at which wet and drought applied at surface would expand and contract it, would certainly part with its water very slowly. We find that, in coal mines and in deep quarries, a stratum of clay of only a few inches thick interposed between two strata of pervious stone will form an effectual bar to the passage of water; whereas, if it lay within a few feet of the surface, it would, in a season of heat and drought become as pervious as a cullender. But when we have got ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... State, at its best, stands for nothing better than the lowest common factor of the human mind. What else can it stand for? State ideals must be ideals that are not beyond the intellect and imagination of "the average citizen"; also, since average minds are not pervious to reason, the reasoning of statesmen must be rhetoric. State morals—law and custom that is to say—are nothing more than excuses for not bothering about conscience. But Ibsen, being an artist, knew that he ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... {of Aglauros}, and that she would be enriched by taking the gold, which she, in her avarice, had demanded. Forthwith she repairs to the abode of Envy, hideous with black gore. Her abode is concealed in the lowest recesses of a cave, wanting sun, {and} not pervious to any wind, dismal and filled with benumbing cold; and which is ever without fire, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... of men, in arms, had been made, from a certain cave, into the adjacent country. Into this cave the troops penetrated with their standards, and, the place being dark, they received many wounds, chiefly from stones thrown. At length the other mouth of the cave being found, for it was pervious, both the openings were filled up with wood, which being set on fire, there perished by means of the smoke and heat, no less than two thousand men; many of whom, at the last, in attempting to make their way ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... might be supposed to offer to the heat waves, were, in many cases, able effectually to bar their passage. It was then proved that while the elementary gases and their mixtures, including among the latter the earth's atmosphere, were almost as pervious as a vacuum to ordinary radiant heat, the compound gases were one and all absorbers, some of them taking up with intense avidity the motion of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... slender, grayish needles are from eight to twelve inches long, and inclined to droop, contrasting with the rigid, dark-colored trunk and branches. No other tree of my acquaintance so substantial in its body has foliage so thin and pervious to the light. The cones are from five to eight inches long and about as large in thickness; rich chocolate-brown in color and protected by strong, down-curving nooks which terminate the scales. Nevertheless the little Douglas Squirrel can open them. Indians climb the trees like bears and ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... of the elementary gases naturally directed attention to elementary bodies 'in other states of aggregation. Some of Melloni's results now attained a new significance. This celebrated experimenter had found crystals of sulphur to be highly pervious to radiant heat; he had also proved that lamp-black, and black glass, (which owes its blackness to the element carbon) were to a considerable extent transparent to calorific rays of low refrangibility. These facts, harmonising so strikingly with the deportment ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... swift pursuing seize me, then, farewell All hope to scape a miserable death, For he hath strength passing the strength of man. How then—shall I withstand him here before The city? He hath also flesh to steel 660 Pervious, within it but a single life, And men report him mortal, howsoe'er Saturnian Jove lift him to glory now. So saying, he turn'd and stood, his dauntless heart Beating for battle. As the pard springs forth 665 To meet the hunter from her gloomy lair, Nor, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... pitch, and, 'mid those groves, Joyfully strain our awnings overhead; And kitchens there construct, and rustic stoves, And carpets for the intended banquet spread. Meanwhile through neighbouring vale the monarch roves, And secret wood, scarce pervious to the tread, Seeking red deer, goat, fallow-buck, and doe; And, following him, two servants bear ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... the light, Far hence my native land, but yet Alas! I never can forget Objects once precious to my sight; Well I remember towering mountains, Snow-ridged, replete with boiling fountains, Woods pervious scarce to wolf or deer, Nor faith, nor manners such as here; But, by what cruel fate o'ercome, How I was snatched, or when, from home I know not,—well the heaving ocean Do I remember, and its roar, ...
— The Bakchesarian Fountain and Other Poems • Alexander Pushkin and other authors |
